Email marketing for letting agents

Communicating with your current tenants, prospective tenants, landlords and suppliers via email is a very fast and effective way of keeping them up to date with relevant news within your agency. This could include the following:

informing everyone of agency opening hours over a holiday period

sending regular lists of vacant or featured rental properties to prospective tenants

Agents often settle for sending emails to large BCC lists within Outlook without realising that a proper, dedicated email marketing tool will make life so much easier, give you much more power over your bulk emailing activities, and look a lot more professional at the same time.

Sending emails to large mailing lists via Outlook is not a good idea for several reasons. Apart from the fact that it’s not easy to send fully-branded HTML emails using this method, your main mail server is not designed for this purposes and will likely slow down all mail receipt and delivery for a period, or even grind to a complete halt. Even more disastrous is that a sudden burst of mail to a large mailing list originating from a normal email server can often be flagged as spam activity which can do long-term damage to your domain’s reputation. A dedicated email solution will use a special server, independent of your internal mail setup, whose sole purpose is to send out out large volumes of mail that are recognised as valid bulk mailing activity.

The lists themselves can be organised to reflect the different categories or groups of people you deal with regularly, e.g. you can maintain a list of landlords, and a separate list of tenants, which in turn may be segmented into current, previous and prospective tenants. You can then choose on a mailshot-by-mailshot basis whom you wish to target, e.g. all lists, just landlords and suppliers, or landlords and current tenants. You can import these email recipient addresses from external applications or files, or you can even insert subscriber forms into your website or Facebook page and people can subscribe into certain lists automatically.

Arguably the most powerful aspect of email marketing lies in the tracking and reporting which it affords over standard email delivery techniques. When you send a mailshot to a group of people you can watch in real time as readers open the email, superimposed on a map view to see their locations – impressive! As they click on various links within the email you can also watch their activity; this can provide invaluable insight into what content most interests particular individuals. This all integrates seamlessly with your Google Analytics account to give detailed tracking of your various marketing campaigns, if you already use this.

One of the most daunting topics surrounding bulk email sending is managing permissions and staying on the right side of the law with regard to permission-based marketing. A dedicated email marketing application will handle this all automatically, providing convenient links on all email correspondence to allow people to remove themselves from your lists if they so wish, and ensuring that you don’t unintentionally send to these people again, which is where email marketing becomes spamming – sending communications to people whom you shouldn’t.

Email marketing and mailshots are a very inexpensive way of staying in touch with your client base. At typically just 1p per recipient, and a standing charge of £5 per mailshot, it’s just a fraction of the cost of traditional communication or advertising media such as print publications, with a level of visibility and a measure of return on investment which simply isn’t possible via other channels.

Considering that you can send a fully branded, attractive and informative email shot to a list of 500 people for just £10 (500 x 1p + £5 delivery) which is just £10, it’s a no-brainer! Contact us today for more details and to get started immediately!